Equilibrium (22 page)

He race-walked to the table, turned off the hot plate, then jogged up to Laura and raised his wineglass to suggest another toast. “To singing,” he said. “Which I kind of, sort of, accidentally on purpose gave up about five months ago.” Well, that explained the performance. Kind of, sort of.

They clinked glasses for a second time, and Aidan stared off into space. Energy buzzed around him. She tried naming the expression on his face, identifying layers of emotions: glee at getting back his sultry voice and a hint of regret at whatever had taken it in the first place. Her knee-jerk reaction pointed at Kitty. The time frame fit.

Laura took the brief lull between songs as an imperative to drink up because she knew what song was coming next, and the perfect opportunity it provided.

Tap, tap, tap.
“Moondance” began with gentle percussion notes, four sets of three beats, rake on drum. A softer secondary swish followed the first resolute note, as though her heartbeat were knocking through the speakers.

She ran her fingers down the back of Aidan’s hand until her palm lay flush against his knuckles and her fingers curled over his fingertips. He could’ve construed her hand on his arm as overboard friendliness, neighborly even, and she didn’t want to leave any doubt in his mind. “Dance?” she asked.

He squinted at her.

“The song,” she said, wondering about her next move, if this one fell flat.

He nodded, as if she’d spoken a full sentence, and glanced at their entwined hands.

“Here.” She lifted Aidan’s hand, arranged his warm fingers at the crook of her waist, and swayed against his palm before she lost her nerve. Stepping closer, he rested his free hand on her shoulder, the way kids slow-danced in middle school after a lecture on maintaining personal space. In time with the music, she swayed nearer, until she’d danced him up against the kitchen counter.

Maintaining eye contact was the hardest part—the way he saw her, really saw her, looking past the charade of her body. She couldn’t stand it for another second, and she ran her fingertip along his jawline. No way he could mistake this gesture, a bold foray into personal space.

Still, just in case he didn’t want this, didn’t want her, she moved slowly and waited until his gaze fell across her lips.

“Laura,” he said, and her name on his breath softened her. “You continually surprise me.” His fingers smoothed the surface of her shoulder and journeyed to her waist, mapping her body with his hand. “Is this like a date?” he asked.

“Like,” she said.

“Then I’d better kiss the girl.” The faintest touch of Aidan’s smiling lips opened her mouth. In time with Van Morrison’s end of song vocal trill, his candied tongue tumbled into her mouth, sharing wine and citrus, ginger and honey. For this performance, he pulled her closer, letting her know he was hers.

“Crazy Love” played, and she smiled at the coincidence because she couldn’t deny how nuts this looked, if anyone were looking from the outside. From the inside of her body, everything felt just right—his mouth an all-encompassing caress that warmed her down to her jeans. Hands in his hair, she deepened the kiss, and he pressed himself against her.

By the time “Caravan” sang of turning up the volume, they were both pretty loud, breath coming out in fits and starts, his hot mouth on her neck, and her hand playing truth or dare at the hem of his T-shirt.
There.
Her fingers traveled the expanse of skin over his nicely delineated stomach muscles, even silkier than she’d imagined.

She wanted more.

Now.
She pulled away slightly and took him by the hand for the second time that night, and for the second time, he gave her that look, all quizzical and concerned. “We should go up to the loft.” She hoped, prayed, he wouldn’t ask her to expand on the notion.

He leaned his forehead against hers, then spoke all hushed, “You don’t have to. You don’t.”

Ah, a man with four sisters, conscious in the way a woman had the right to say
no
up until the last possible moment. “Yes, but you see, I want to.” Then, risking more than when she’d dared touching his stomach, “Unless, of course,
you
don’t want to.”

He nuzzled into her hair. “Oh, yeah, I want,” he said, and turned the dimmer switch, lowering the loft-side ceiling light before following her up the ladder.

She climbed the ten steps to the platform and discovered her hands were shaking again, her body throwing up a signal of caution she had no intention of answering. She skirted a week’s worth of Aidan’s discarded clothing—scrubs, jeans, cotton socks—and lay sideways on his unmade bed.

He came to her and held her hands until the erratic energy ceased. When she was ready to start over, he went across the room and slid the closet door open, revealing a dumbbell and a stack of weights. He dropped to his knees and foraged through a built-in drawer.

Should she take off her clothes? Not exactly romantic, but no more ridiculous than their awkward removal by an impatient partner.

Years ago, fearing a gradual shedding would highlight her inexperience, she’d disrobed for Jack all at once. She’d stepped out of her button-fly Levi’s and onto the threadbare Oriental in his hardback-scented office, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. In subsequent visits, she’d relaxed and found the slow removal of clothing more gratifying, even when shirts tangled and pants bunched. Then, in recent years, they’d both taken to coming to bed naked whenever Jack’s mood swung upward. For her, to get it over with, and for Jack, to avoid burdensome preliminary activities, like kissing and touching. Like looking at each other.

Jack could never win when it came to their arguments over his meds, so he chose to wage a horizontal war, using her body as his battlefield of choice.

“Laura?”

Aidan, this beautiful man, the essence of pure goodness in action, was calling to her from no more than four feet away.
Get the hell out of my head, Jack. I deserve this.

Aidan held up a box of Trojans, not purchased for her, of course, but at least it was unopened. “Do you, are you . . . ?” He rubbed at the back of his neck, suddenly shy.

She hadn’t planned this far ahead. “No, nothing,” she said. Then, unable to filter her thoughts, “I’ve never been with anyone but Jack.”

He opened the glossy box, ripped off a single packet, and then laid it on the pillow next to her. “You’re practically a virgin,” he said, and sure enough, his approving gaze made her new again, a woman without a past. He took off his shirt before lying next to her on his side and waited patiently for her signal to move forward, a very deliberate reserve, judging by the urgency his body was evidencing. “Come Running” played, the music drifting up to surround them, and in the instinctual dance of man and woman, they moved together.

A Renaissance man
, she decided, losing track of time but not her habit of naming, controlling her experiences the way Adam and Eve held dominion over the Garden of Eden. Skilled in the art of appreciation, Aidan savored with all his five senses—visually exploring, inhaling her skin, touching, tasting, listening for her responses. The room spun, and she held on, digging her nails into the tender flesh of his shoulder blades.

Kneeling, he tore open the gleaming red packet.

“I can do it,” she said. When she took her sweet time unrolling the condom onto him, he closed his eyes. His lips pursed.

Lover.
She tried out the term as he lowered himself onto her. Then, in a split-second decision, urged her up so they were both sitting. In an equal position, she opened up and let him inside her.
Oh, God.
She’d forgotten how good it felt, how it could feel. Should. How it should feel.

Ecstasy
, a state beyond reason and self-control, a trancelike state, leading naturally to
bliss
, an expression of heaven.
Exuberance
too; they both showed a joyous lack of restraint.

Clinging, kissing, rocking, the energy flowed back and forth between them. “Glad Tidings” played through to the final note until their bodies provided the only night music. Close, so close.

“Laura,” he said, as though, yes, he knew the effect of speaking her name at just the right moment.
Oh, God. Rapture. Aidan.

Then, for the best of reasons, she lost the need for words.

 

The alarm clock glowed a red two a.m. warning, sitting kitty-corner on the loft floorboards, and it took Laura a few seconds to make sense of it all. Aidan curled behind her, claiming her with his arms wrapped securely, the warmth of his body heating her back, his breath shallow like a sleeping child’s. Just a sheet draped over them, and the comforter lay rumpled on the floor. She could neither recall the original arrangement of bedding nor the drifting into sleep.

She untangled herself from his bear hug, came to sitting, and ran her hand down the length of her body, wondering who she’d become. Laura, but not Laura. Aidan clutched a handful of sheets and rolled onto his back.

She hunted down the trail of her clothing and discovered her jeans wrapped like burrito filling in the roll of the comforter, her underwear laid modestly beneath a pillow, and the white T-shirt folded multiple times upon itself and peeking out from the bottom of the sheets, keeping company with Aidan’s feet. She couldn’t help but wonder what on earth her bra was doing with Aidan’s jeans, squashed up against the door of the closet.

She slinked back into her rumpled clothing and knelt beside the mattress. A rectangle of moonlight streamed through the skylight and showcased the curve of Aidan’s face, his dark eyelashes, the length of his naked body. Pressure built behind her eyes, and she fought the urge to kiss the gentle slope of his mouth. His beautiful, sensitive, loving mouth.

What had she done?

Days ago, she’d told Aidan they shouldn’t date because if her children knew, they might get emotionally involved. Last night, she’d come clean with Aidan, mostly, and shared her family’s problems with him, if only to scare him away from drawing him into unfair emotional involvement with
her
. Last night, she’d intended nothing more than mutual sexual satisfaction, what the kids called friends with benefits.

Who the hell was she kidding? Last night, they’d made love.

Aidan blinked his eyes open. “Where are you going and why are you wearing clothes?”

She laughed, and the chuckle released wetness onto her cheeks. She batted it away. “I have to get to bed, my bed. And if my children find me walking around naked, I’ll scare them to death.”

Aidan came up on one elbow, regarded her face, and his gaze narrowed. “Laura,” he said, sweet and soft and drawn out to soothe. He sat up and pressed his lips to her cheek, a streak of tears she’d missed, and her chest clenched. She stroked the back of his neck.

She had no right to pursue happily ever after with Aidan. She understood her place in life. She alone was responsible for her children. In one hand, she held the knowledge she’d never seek to make her relationship with Aidan anything more than what she’d originally intended. Her other hand held all her selfish wants, and the torture of the impossible completely unbalanced her.

Chapter 26

T
echnically, she was still a virgin.

So when her mother had asked, pressed the point, wondered out loud at whether she, Darcy, had been with Nick in the biblical sense, had allowed the penetration of a specifically male part of his body into her specifically female region, she’d answered
no
. Truthfully, they’d done everything else.

When they were alone, her clothes fell away as quickly as her inhibitions. High on Nick, her body urged her to give away more, not less, and do anything he asked. Maybe this not so gradual change should’ve surprised her, but it didn’t. What really shocked her senseless was the way Nick had invaded not her body, but her mind. They’d taken to finishing each other’s sentences, as though they were a quaint old couple celebrating their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Sometimes, she’d know what he was thinking when they weren’t even talking. The look on his face would give him away. And she could always tell, ten times out of ten, when the phone rang and he was on the other end.

“Nick,” she said, after she’d raced from the living room and had scooped up the kitchen phone on its second ring. “You’re back!” After Nick had suffered several of his father’s I-swear-I’ve-changed phone calls, he’d decided to visit the wife beater in person. For the first time ever, Darcy had wished the weekend away, anything to span the seemingly insurmountable forty-eight hours Nick was spending with his father in Nashua. She’d refused more than one party invitation, actually got her homework done Friday night, and then passed all of Saturday biting down her nails, convinced Nick was in a terrible, nameless trouble.

“Hey, pretty girl. I’m on my way home,” Nick said, his voice strangely thick. She thought she heard a motorcycle revving behind Nick’s voice, passing him in traffic. “There’s something I need to show you. Can I pick you up in, say, half an hour?”

“Absolutely.” Just enough time to get ready for a date—fix her hair and pick out clothes, anticipating the fun of their removal.

“Later, gator.”

So freakin’ cute! Whenever Nick used one of those goofy phrases, clashing with his usual street talk, it only made her like him more.

She headed to Aidan’s apartment to give her mother the update. Mom, Troy, and Lover Boy were getting ready to go hiking. Mom had even asked her to tag along.
As if!
She couldn’t imagine how to fake not seeing through her mother’s transparent game for an entire day, couldn’t imagine how she could choke down her mother’s story that she and Aidan were
just friends
along with the bags of trail mix they’d prepared. One of these days, it was going to slip out and it would
so
not be her fault. At her mother’s age, she should be more careful. Darcy shuddered thinking about it, imagining them going at it, locked in a gross movie contortion.

She knocked on Aidan’s door, and Aidan appeared, grinning like an idiot, his default expression. “Change your mind?”

“No,” she said, and walked right past him.

Troy wore an unfamiliar black day pack, and Aidan tightened the belt so the weight rested on Troy’s hips. “Now we’re talking. Feel okay?”

“Feels super,” Troy said. “Load ’er up.”

Darcy could ignore the open containers of peanuts, raisins, dried cranberries, and white and dark chocolate chips lining Aidan’s kitchen counter. But the butterscotch morsels watered her mouth.

Mom scooped Gatorade Frost powder into one of three empty Nalgene bottles and ran the tap. Blue puffs sprayed the air, replacing butterscotch with the taste of snow: raspberry with mint at the edges. “Nick’s on his way to pick me up,” Darcy said.

Mom screwed the Nalgene lid and gave the bottle three sideways shakes. “Where are you going?”

“Not sure. Greenboro Lake?” Darcy said, and her mother nodded, assuming Darcy had meant the public access side, where horny teenagers couldn’t mess around unnoticed.

Mom set the bottle aside, and she turned around to ensure eye contact. “And how can I reach you?”

“Nick’s cell?” Darcy said, since Nick would shut off his phone when they got busy.

“I’d like you to join us,” Aidan said, and his happy-camper face got serious, his eye contact harder to ignore than her mother’s. “You could invite Nick.”

Darcy glanced at her mother. “Why not?” Laura said, as if Aidan were the dad in charge.

If Daddy were alive, he wouldn’t have helped Mom prepare the family for a hike. He would’ve waited like royalty, writing or researching or sorting papers in his office, while Mom reviewed the contents of their packs, mixed gorp, and ensured last year’s emergency whistles sounded clear.

From Mom’s day pack, Aidan removed a bread bag full of sandwiches, and he zipped the stack of PB&Js into his own pack. He held both packs by the straps, then lifted and lowered the two weights.

If Daddy were alive, he would’ve hung back till it was time to leave. He would’ve let Mom do it all, instead of sharing the load.

“Come with us,” Aidan said, “and I’ll even carry your gorp. You know, to take care of quality control.” Aidan winked at Darcy, and she accidentally smiled. For a split second, she pictured it: Mom and Aidan, her and Troy, a happy little hiking family.

For a split second, she replaced her daddy.

Darcy sucked air, but she couldn’t get a full breath. “Can’t.” Her reed-thin voice ushered the sensation of Daddy’s afternoon shadow roughing her face, and she fingered her cheek.

“Hang on a sec.” Aidan unzipped his pack, dug down deep, and came up with his bag of gorp. He handed it to Darcy, killing her with butterscotch kindness. “I was planning on stealing your mom, anyway,” Aidan said.

With an ache, Darcy’s stomach cartwheeled. “What did you say?”

“Planning to steal your mom’s gorp,” Aidan said, and this time, Darcy heard the possessive
s
.

“I need to go change,” Darcy said. Then, before Mom and Aidan had a chance to exchange one of their not so secret looks, Darcy stepped between them. She kissed Mom on the cheek and made a break for the Klein part of the house.

“That was random,” Troy said, and her brother’s clueless as usual comment nipped at Darcy’s heels.

Troy didn’t know everything.

He didn’t know that, weeks ago, for the first time in years, Darcy had woken up in the middle of the night, wanting her mother. Not as a result of nightmare bad guys chasing her down the street, but from a sick tension striking when she’d remembered about Troy’s bipolar genes potentially lying in wait.

After she’d checked on Troy, feeling slightly bizarre, she’d gone to Mom’s room and found her bed not only empty, but also untouched—the coverlet snug and pillows neatly arranged. Okay, not even her neurotic mother made the bed before going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Darcy couldn’t smell anything, but maybe Mom was downstairs, getting ready to bake. If Darcy hurried, she could help.

She ran down the stairs with visions of baking in her head—gingersnaps, Mexican wedding cookies, shortbread with jam centers, moist chocolate macaroons bursting with coconut. At the threshold to the mudroom, she’d stopped short, her head snapping back against the sight of her mother’s flannel-lined bed slippers angling toward Aidan’s door, as though Mom had stepped from them while running, and then kept on going.

Her mother, the always proper widow Klein, was a hypocrite.

Darcy wished she’d had the foresight to record her mother’s perpetual lecture on the dangers of premarital sex. Mom didn’t seem too worried about pregnancy, disease, or a broken heart. Really, Darcy was surprised at herself for not figuring it all out even before finding the slippers. She should’ve known from the way Mom and Aidan stood too close, the way Aidan stared at Mom, pathetically magnetized, and, the biggest evidence of all, the way if Aidan caught Mom’s eye, she’d quickly look away and raise a hand to her cheek.

Darcy ran up the stairs and headed straight for the hair spray she kept on the shelf in the bathroom, a necessary evil for days like today, foreshadowing summer humidity. She spritzed her head with the rest of the hair spray to smooth down her wild waves, even though Nick always said he loved her hair. He’d bury his nose in her hair and breathe deeply, as though he might inhale her.
Mmm.

She added hair spray to her mental list of special items needed for the prom, touching the top of her head, a trick for remembering. She tapped her shoulders for the iridescent lotion, her chest for the strapless bra, her—well, Nick had said he’d take care of the condoms, purchase a brand-spanking-new box with her name on it. She didn’t think she was the jealous type, but the idea of him dipping into a box he’d used for other girls made her want to tear it up into red confetti, find the sluts, and shove it down their throats.

Never mind. Nick was all hers now.

In her bedroom, she threw on a pair of stone-colored cotton pants and a lavender eyelet camisole, a dressier outfit than her usual weekend clothing. She was declaring today a holiday. This morning she’d awoken with the fierceness of realizing the obvious: she was in love with Nick.

She was working her feet into blue suede wedge sandals and simultaneously glossing her lips with cinnamon balm when Nick’s Monte Carlo growled into the driveway. He honked the horn, and she snapped up her beaded purse, her heart flying down the stairs ahead of her. Usually, Nick would honk to let her know he was there, and then knock on the front door to keep her mother happy, proving that even a boy with a rusty car could have good manners.

Today, the car sat idling at the edge of the circular drive, facing the street with Nick behind the wheel, waiting for her. She swung through the screen door, kicked the side door shut, and raced to Nick’s wide-open passenger-side door.

Nick turned and smiled at her.

“Oh my God!” His left eye squinted from the depths of a swollen lid. Sun glinted off the slit of violet-blue iris, and a matching hue formed a half-moon pool beneath his pale lower lashes. “What happened?” Instinctively, she touched his face.

He stiffened, inhaled sharply, and peered around her in the direction of her house.

“Nobody’s home. Let’s go inside.” The way his gaze flitted made her jumpy, too. Made her want to take him up to her room, lock the doors, and bar the windows.

He shook his head. “I’ve got a better idea.” He put the car in drive and careened onto the street. She tried holding his hand, but his fingers clenched around the steering wheel, turning white at the knuckles. And whenever she touched him, rubbing his shoulder or resting a hand on his leg, he’d have trouble breathing and his left eye would squint even smaller.

She squeezed her hands together in her lap. “I’m so sorry,” she said, apologizing, even though she’d no idea what had happened. For once, Nick didn’t take his eyes off the road, as though her gaze hurt more than her touch.

Pine scent further thickened the moist air, and they turned into the familiar drive leading to the vacant cottage. They’d taken to calling the property their own, even though they only parked in the driveway on their way to the lake for skinny-dipping and pressing curious prints into the sand.

The Monte Carlo roared to a stop. Nick jogged around to the trunk and took out his cooler. “Let’s go.”

She kept her hand on the back of his sweat-dampened T-shirt while they walked past the spot where they’d cut down the cottage-side hammock weeks ago just because it bothered her. Nick stopped at the back door, knocked, and then cocked his head. “What d’you know. Nobody’s home.” He turned the knob easily, and the door swung silently inward.

“When?” she asked, knowing he’d fill in the sentence to mean,
When did you work the door?
Nick’s black eye wasn’t scheduled, but she could bet he’d thought about this particular presentation for a long time and made sure everything would unfold according to plan. She couldn’t wait to see what surprise he was saving for her in the cooler. She hoped it was covered in chocolate.

“So easy,” he said. “Took me, like, thirty seconds to jimmy the lock. The place was asking for it. I’m surprised nobody’s done it before.” Nick held the cooler in front of him so they could fit through the door side by side.

“Oh, Nick.” He’d done a lot more than breaking and entering. He’d even thought to open the window behind the cracked porcelain sink, lessening the musty smell. From the looks of the kitchen, he’d stopped by a few times to mop the black-and-white checkered linoleum, wipe the laminate counters, and scrub down the one item that hunched her shoulder into a shiver. Beneath a red, yellow, and blue stained-glass window sat an original built-in 1950s dinette, metallic red seats and all, direct from the diner of her dreams. Thankfully, today, no ghost of her father waited for booth-side service.

Nick slid the cooler onto the bench and leaned against the table, opening his arms to her. She kissed him lightly; she was afraid his whole face might hurt. They hugged until tremors moved through him, and she pulled away. Nick’s black-and-blue eye closed. His good eye squinted, his face a lopsided grimace. “What happened?” she asked him again, and touched his face again, hoping he’d feel comfortable telling her in their cottage. “Please.” She had to know so she could fix it.

He shook his head. “I don’t know where to start.”

“How about the beginning?”

“Like, when I was born?”

“You probably don’t have to go back that far. Tell me what happened this weekend. Tell me who gave you the black eye.” She had her theories, the obvious suspect, but Nick needed to tell her.

He held her around the waist, tugged her closer. “I’m so stupid for giving him another chance. I told him no way I was gonna see him again. No fucking way!”
Ouch.
A little too loud in her ear.

Darcy whispered, so Nick would lower his voice, too. “Your dad?”

“Him! Garrett, if you need a name. I don’t have a father. And that’s what I told him when he started in on me. The worthless, lazy piece of—”